Johnna Torsone, longtime executive vice president and chief human resources officer at the business-services company Pitney Bowes, can
look back on her career and see how it
mirrors the radical changes in HR over
the last three decades.

The Albany Law School grad spent
the first half of her career as a labor
and employment attorney, joining the
Stamford, Conn.-based firm in 1990
and working on labor-law and diversity
issues before becoming its chief human
resource officer in 2003. Like her own
career, the focus of HR has become
less legalistic and bogged down by rote
functions such as payroll and benefits
administration, and more about building
a winning culture at Pitney Bowes and
developing its top executives.

“The transformation of human
resources from more or less an
administrative, strictly employee-relations
function to more of a strategic business
partner” is the most dramatic change
that Torsone says she’s witnessed in her
27 years dealing with employment and
HR issues at Pitney Bowes.

Torsone is one of the HR executives
who’s held a front-row seat for 30 years
of dramatic transitions in their field.
It has been an era when sweeping
changes in the wider American
workplace—with the rise of a service
economy and booming high-tech
and financial sectors—revolutionized
the art and the science of human
resources. Gone forever is the notion
of HR as a second-tier administrative
function, tied to negotiated labor
contracts or tasked with complying
with a raft of federal equal-opportunity
mandates. In its place: The 21st century
human resource executive, who works
closely with the CEO in developing key
business strategies that affect the firm’s
bottom line while creating a culture
to retain the most talented workers
and attract promising millennials to a
vibrant, socially committed firm.

“It’s been gradual, but I do think
there’s been a much stronger realization
over the course of that time frame that
HR is a critical function to a business,”
says John Murabito, executive vice
president for human resources and
services at Cigna, the Philadelphia-based health insurance giant, noting the
strong C-suite awareness of a concept

Yesterday and Today

To help celebrate the 30-yearanniversary of Human ResourceExecutive®, we talked to a half-dozenleaders in the HR field to pick theirbrains about what have been the mostimportant developments in peoplemanagement over the past 30 years,what major new changes loom on thehorizon, and what are some of theskills that will be required for the HRexecutive of the future.

What’s clear from these
conversations is that the modern
history of managing human relations
is, in some ways, deeply intertwined
with the broader tale of how business
and the workplace have evolved
during those same years—as the U.S.
economy transitioned from its sturdy
manufacturing roots to one based more
on innovation and service.

Darryl Robinson, executive vice
president and chief human resource
officer at Dignity Health, the San
Francisco-based hospital system, has
watched that epic transition since he
graduated in 1981 with a labor relations
degree from Michigan State and took a
job in Kansas City with the steelmaker
then known as Armco, which had a
strong union and a bustling factory
floor. Some 36 years later, he says he
can still see the bright flash of molten
steel.

The younger Robinson was eagerto negotiate labor contracts and gotthe opportunity at Armco and his nextjob at Mead Paper, where he says hehelped strike 18 different labor deals.Although he still deals with unionizednurses in his current post at DignityHealth, the HR veteran says the jobnow involves less negotiation andmore creativity. “In the last 10 yearsthe focus has been on strategy … howdo you take an organization that isFor many HR executives, thedownsizing of manufacturing and thetransition of the workforce became asignificant storyline as the millenniumturned. At Pitney Bowes, Torsonesays executives saw early onthat many of its Connecticutfactory jobs would vanish,and HR was tasked withdeveloping a transitionprogram that would trainblue-collar employeesin computers or otherskills, as well as Englishlanguage classes. SaysTorsone: “We knewthis work was going[away], so we were verytransparent about why thisIn 1987, the year that HRE firstpublished, personal computers werejust gaining a toehold, and widespreaduse of the Internet was still a decadeaway. For HR leaders, the sweepingchange in technology has been adefining feature of the last 30 years,drastically changing the workflowwithin HR.

“I think technology has had a
massive, positive influence on our
business,” says Pam Kimmet, CHRO
at Dublin, Ohio-based Cardinal Health.
She previously held the top HR
positions at Coca-Cola Enterprises,
Bear Stearns and Lucent Technologies,
after stints at Citigroup and General
Motors.

When she first joined the
profession, it mostly involved “people
administration”—work that, as
Kimmet recalls, took “a lot of arms
and legs” to get done. But the ability
to perform once-complex tasks such
as benefits management with the help
of technology, she says, has played a
key role in liberating HR executives so
they could now focus more on business
strategy and getting the most out of the
workforce. With the increasing ability
to move key tasks such
as employee training
online, or use social
media to connect
and motivate
employees, the
importance of
technology
has only
accelerated
in recent
years.

“At mycompany,Technology has also helped fuelanother key development in HR overthe last three decades: Dealing withrapid globalization. HR leaders—particularly at large corporations—saythe modern multinational workforcehas hastened the need to develop acompanywide culture and norms thatcan cross the International Date Line.D’Ambrose says that’s certainly thecase at ADM, whose 32,000 employeeswork in 160 different nations. Heexplained that ADM strives to“articulate the difference that we make… that we feed the world.”

Evangelists for Diversity

Both globalization and the rapidpace of change has made most topenmore effective workforce.